How has recent research questioned the role of an individual's conscious free will in determining action?
We usually perform highly complex and meaningful movements without actually thinking we should execute them. Examples of this come from everyday unawareness of our actions, for example 'tuning out' when driving home, or 'lapsus linguae' in which we say something that we are unaware of (e.g. 'I'd like you to meet my friend Fatty, I mean Hattie!'). Conversely, there are situations in which we are fully aware of what we are or are not doing. The following essay will discuss recent studies of awareness of action and intention to act, asking under which conditions we become aware of actions, which aspects of actions we are aware of, the extent to which we are aware of our intentions, and finally, the symptoms of unawareness syndromes and the way in which they can inform models of action awareness.
A key question in motor awareness research is that of whether we intended to act, what the intended action was, and whether we achieved it. Research has been conducted on object directed actons, namely upon the visual processing of the object (i.e. object recognition). However, we also use vision to direct actions toward an object. Typically, these two processes occur together, but research has sought to answer whether one reaches to an object, forming the appropriate hand shape and size, regardless of whether the object has been recognized. Most of our actions toward external objects are prepared and executed automatically, in less than a second. This is guided by visuomotor representations, and it is thought that generating a motor response to a stimulus and building a conscious experience of the same stimulus may be distinct processes. An extreme example demonstrating this comes from Perenin and Rosetti's (1996) study into occipital lobe damage, in which a golfball is presented to the blind hemisphere of an individual who is cortically blind. Asking the...